De Blasio plans to turn cluster sites that shelter the homeless into affordable housing

“If there is not good faith negotiation, the city is prepared to use as a last resort eminent domain to take these buildings and convert them to permanent affordable housing,” de Blasio said at a Bronx press conference Tuesday. (Edwin J. Torres)

Mayor de Blasio wants to buy privately owned apartment buildings used to house the homeless and turn them into affordable housing units — and if owners don't want to sell, he's prepared to try to force them.

"If there is not good faith negotiation, the city is prepared to use as a last resort eminent domain to take these buildings and convert them to permanent affordable housing," de Blasio said at a Bronx press conference Tuesday. "One way or another, we will achieve the goal."

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The buildings at issue are "cluster sites," or apartments the city houses homeless people in, often paying the building owners well above the market rent — as much as $4,000 a month.

The city has reduced the number of apartments it's using by 1,100 units, but the process has taken longer than originally planned. Today, 2,272 families remain in about 2,300 cluster units.

Now it wants to help nonprofits buy 25 to 30 where half or more of the units are currently being used as cluster housing for the homeless. The nonprofits would fix them up and then offer the tenants of the buildings — about 800 homeless families and 300 other tenants — rent-stabilized leases.

The city would not say how much rents might cost, but said homeless families who want to remain in their apartments would be given various forms of rental assistance if they needed it to make the new rent.

De Blasio said the city would offer the property owners a "fair price," though he would not offer a ballpark for individual properties or for the program as a whole.

"We would like fruitful, positive negotiations to result in a sale at an appropriate price," de Blasio said. "If that's not happening, we'll move to eminent domain."

Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steve Banks said eminent domain laws allow the city to purchase property at a fair price "for a public purpose."

"Our public purpose is addressing homelessness, family homelessness, and ending the cluster program," Banks said.

The Rent Stabilization Association, which represents owners of 1 million rent-stabilized units in the city, ripped the plan — calling it "unfeasible, impractical and unsustainable" and warning of a "housing catastrophe."

"Are you going to keep taking apartments from the private sector every time a politician declares the need for affordable housing?" RSA President Joseph Strasburg said in a statement. "Where do you draw the line?"

For years, building owners raked in big dough from the city on the cluster program — raising the question of why they'd consider selling their buildings. But de Blasio argued they should know that gravy train will end.

"The cluster program is ending — there's one incentive," he said, noting the departure from 1,000 units already. "We're willing to offer a fair price and I just think it's the right thing to do."

De Blasio and Banks said they thought they had a strong argument for eminent domain. Thomas Merrill, a property law scholar and eminent domain expert at Columbia Law School, called it an "odd one."

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"Usually eminent domain is used for some kind of situation where there's sort of a site-specific problem — you need to expand on an existing facility or you need to put a highway through on a certain route or you need to do something like that," he told the News.

But under the city's argument about cluster sites, "you could pick housing anywhere and condemn it and transfer it to a nonprofit for these purposes," he said.

Still, New York has a "generous" interpretation of eminent domain laws, Merrill said, but he suspects landlords would go to court and challenge it "as not a legitimate public use."

"It would not be trivial litigation," he said. "It would probably tie things up."

Eminent domain is not usually the fastest way to acquire property, he said, nor much, if any, cheaper — hence why it's not often used when there are other alternatives. In this case, the threat of it may be a bargaining tool, Merrill said.

"They probably want to get this project going without a lot of squabbling and negotiating and so forth," he said.